What Every IIT Boy Needs To Know: Building Emotional Intelligence

Open fire!
On my burning heart
I’ve never been lucky in love
My defences are down
A kiss or a frown
I can’t survive on my own
~Send Me An Angel, Real Life

Disclaimer: I am not a misogynist or a misandrist. All arguments presented in this article are either based on personal experiences or communicated by someone else.

Prologue

This boy was friends with a girl and spent time together - doing assignments, that kind of thing. Then he went on to narrate this peculiar incident one evening when he texted her to meet up for a chat as he was feeling under the weather. She texted back that she couldn’t because she had to study. Later that night, he spotted her along with other boys at a club while scrolling through Instagram.

Some of you might dismiss this incident by saying that this is an outlier rogue behaviour and girls are generally not rude¹ and I might agree but this anecdote underscores a major systemic trend that I wish to address in this article.

A feature, not a bug

The following observation has often been pointed out by both critics and supporters of the IIT system, often to the point of being touted as a “problem” of the IITs in popular media - namely, the skewed gender ratio ². But I consider this a feature of the IIT system, not a bug.

The following is the total male-female count over the past four years as per official annual reports released by IIT Delhi:

These numbers have a profound effect on the psychological and social tendencies of both genders within the confines of the IIT threshold. Drawing from economic principles, it makes the girls more scarce⁴. For every girl, there are around 3 boys within IIT and it creates an artificial imbalance in how the two genders interact.

The poor boy

The boys are generally what one would typically call a nerd in popular terminology - socially inept but extremely diligent and focused. But what’s more? Sufficiently disillusioned by ill-founded notions of IIT being a magical gateway to a happy and secure life, they are also constantly fed the imminent fate of their romantic life, being in an IIT effectively means butchering that dream.

They google “gender ratio in IIT XYZ” and are greeted by some of the dreadful numbers above. Being so intensely pre-conditioned by society to believe that the path of romance is forever closed to them, once they land up in IIT and discover that the constant oversight of their elders no more, the few paths that do exist, begin to seem exceedingly enticing.

What does it lead to?

Even if we assumed perfect pairing and no external pairing, there would still be around 60% of the IIT population who would be single. This still seems fine unless I frame it as follows: 60% of the male population are single, whereas 0% of the female population are single.

1

As disheartening as it might sound but this fact coupled with the conditioned belief of most boys to believe that “getting a bandi” in IIT is some kind of feat leads to deep-seated enmity of the girls among the boys - a fact most impressively brought up in the subtler conversations within closed boys groups (Around 2AM in boy’s hostel wings work best); the topic of these closed group discussions will irrevocably be either girls or substances, the arguments might get more nuanced as one progress through the years but the general character of degrading the female remains constant. I was personally left in awe wondering how these men would go on to lead the country and become leaders of tomorrow. What kind of respect and tolerance have we imbued and inculcated in these formative years?

One might dismiss this as a troubled conscience of the abuser but that would be irresponsible. Because 80% of the IIT population is male and such malformed misogynistic sentiments feed into the institutional machineries and guide the ethos that we pass on to our juniors.

2

As the girls get to know that they are wanted, their behaviour undergoes a significant change as well. There have been instances of girls calling out for help while playing on the emotional expectations of someone else, generally a boy. I have personally been approached twice with this intention and I have respectfully turned them down while pointing out what I suspected was happening to me. But I’m afraid not everyone has the kind of eye to look through such malfeasance. What we have is a group of boys who are almost tied on a leash to some girl who holds unreasonable control over their lives. This is what I call the lapdog gang.

One observes interesting things if one is looking for them, specifically how most boys and girls are pretending - boys are pretending that they are happy and girls that they care at all - in a self-defeating beauty contest that mostly ends up hurting both the parties.

3

Interestingly, there exists a divisive social dynamic between boys who are in a relationship ³ versus those who don’t. In particular, we observe a growing tendency to appease the female group at the cost of growing more distant from other boys. Specifically, residents of Saptagiri and Dronagiri will be able to back me up on this.

What is the fundamental issue?

Boys seem to have lost the sensibility of critical thinking and self-awareness. They have either sunk into wasting time getting laid (those who can) or wasting time lamenting that they can’t. This increasingly growing group ends up becoming a nuisance to both boys and girls around them. More often than not, a text from the girl is an invitation for conversation, and not to become romantically involved. In short, boys seem to be lacking emotional intelligence².

No one ever talks about becoming excellence or likeable. A self-reinforcing cycle of scrolling through Instagram and feeling bad about expectations or feeling jealous. But where is the effort to become competent?

Emotional Intelligence not part of the syllabus

In an increasingly ideologically volatile youth generation, the question of “Who is your role model?” is met by depraved answers to the likes of Instagram influencers - a growing fleet of equally non-critical youth who portray or embody a reality we all crave, thereby hacking into the innate human tendency of desire. There is nothing more scandalous than the degradation of the true capacity of the human spirit!

Read! Read! Goddamnit Read!

We find a generation that is increasingly reaching out to so-called “self-helps” and shying away from attempting to understand the details of things. We want to swallow the chewed food of someone else because it’s easier. We must intervene when we find ourselves cutting corners. Self-awareness is an indispensable asset in understanding when one is being fooled or deceived. It is a gradual process, not an innate talent!

How do engineers solve any problem? What’s the first step? Well, they observe the problem. Then, find a model to approximately represent the problem. Then, the attempt is to extract some characteristics of the model based on some constraints. Well, life is the biggest optimisation problem!

But how much have we observed it? How much have you observed it? Reading gives one access to experiences that are spatially and temporally inaccessible otherwise. One cannot live the experiences of a Vietnam soldier or understand the nuances of Greek social order but the reader can!

What I’m getting at is simple: The prevalent boys mentality is a product of accepting mediocrity. It is a product of accepting the patch of reality illuminated by the narrow pencil of light that leaks through the keyhole and never daring to open the door itself.

How many students on campus today can engage in meaningful debate regarding what’s going on in the world or the country?⁵ As a community, we are unable to process complex emotions like empathy or abstract ideas of collectivism and community because we lack context. And then when something unwanted happens, we all feel sad (or pretend, I don’t know) and subtly shift the blame to somebody else to subconsciously feel safer, better.

Points to ponder for the boys

Why would any girl want to spend time with you? What do you expect to offer apart from being able to solve a bunch of optimisation problems on paper?

If I may be allowed to enjoy this digression, one must realise a better understanding of love; one that is not selfish but so utterly disjoint from the realisation of personal or self-pleasure that no matter what happens, it doesn’t end up affecting them at all. I think this is required in general. Not professing celibacy or resignation to a strict abstentious hermit lifestyle but to work towards deserving things rather than running after things.

Parting Thoughts

That’s the way to build a more stable and pleasant society. When people are more humble in expectations and know how to deal with failure when it strikes - that builds resilience and character.

Trivia

Starting today and inspired by Neel Nanda, I’ll try to blog everyday. I hypothesise that increased output will help me to streamline my thoughts and more importantly, to incentivise me to think in the first place. I’m afraid I might be becoming intellectually lazy. Since these posts will have fewer hours put in them, expect them to be unpolished and more “raw”.

Footnotes

1: In fact, I’ll also speculate that some of you might argue that the girl’s behaviour is justified because it is “her choice” and I wholly agree with you. But at the same time, you have miserably failed to see the problem.

2: Both the “singles” and the “doubles” are equally deprived of this intelligence.

3: Or the “playboys” who are maximising on how often they can get laid. Question: Is it a bad measure to quantify love? How do I know if I have won? Surely, we all seek pleasure and life is finite so maximising pleasure should be one’s primary objective. Only that love doesn’t yield to such rational simplification. And therein lies the problem. Ah, the eternal problem.

4: At the risk of being horribly understood wherein I seem to be hinting towards some kind of commodification of girls - like watches or cars but I’m not, it just explains my point better.

5: Not one person in my three years of experience.